By Tom Dodge
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-936530.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Eating - and maybe football - will be the focus of Thanksgiving for many, but commentator Tom Dodge says there's another benefit to the holiday.
Thanksgiving for me growing up in the small town of Cleburne sometimes meant getting up early and walking with my mother to the Central Texas Bus station for the ten-mile journey to Grandpa Conner's house in Joshua. He was actually my great-grandfather but my mother called him Grandpa Conner and so I did too. He would be waiting for us in his rocking chair on his front porch, smoking his pipe, his little terrier dog by his side.
Inside would be my mother's two maiden aunts, Harriet and Geneva, Geneva whirling about in the kitchen preparing the food and older sister Harriet drinking coffee, smiling, taking in every word of Geneva's running monologue of Joshua's latest excitement. They were dedicated to seeing after Grandpa Conner since the death of their mother in the 1930s. He bought and sold livestock and raised chickens and turkeys. One of these turkeys I smelled roasting in the oven and wondered if it was the one that always ran up to me and flapped its wings when I went into the pen.
Eventually we sat down to the toothsome delicacies of Aunt Geneva's divine cookery, mounds of fresh garden vegetables centering on the golden-basted turkey and its hand-made dressing. I remember staring at the turkey for a long time.
I asked Grandpa Conner about the turkey with the flapping wings. He said this was in fact that very turkey, but it was proud to be chosen to for this momentous occasion. Well, he said something like that. But no matter how he said it, it didn't make me feel much better as I was eating it.
When I was older, though, I saw the beauty of it all, not just of eating the sacrificial turkey and the feast prepared by the maiden aunt, and her wondrous stories of relatives abiding in the Caddo cemetery. Not only Aunt Harriet's twinkling blue eyes, the little dog on the porch, and the aroma of the Prince Albert tobacco glowing in the patriarch's pipe. But I eventually understood the mythic meaning of the occasion. The journey by the young to the patriarch's house was important in antiquity as a quest taken for enlightenment and self-awareness.
Now, I am the family patriarch, and on this Thanksgiving, coming to visit me for the first time will be my own great-grandson, Mason C. Douglas, the C standing for Conner. He'll be hardly three months old, traveling from Virginia to sit on my lap as I did on Grandpa Conner's, whose enormous rocker I intend to get out of my shed for the occasion.
Taking me on this Thanksgiving journey was the best thing my mother did for me, I believe. This kind of ancestral knowledge has become devalued today but social scientists know that a child with no shared family artifacts, no lore to tether them to the past, operates at a disadvantage in life. This used to be one of the main functions of holiday festivals.
When Mason C. Douglas sits on my lap this Thanksgiving Day he will be linked by living history to his great-great-great-great-grandfather Conner. In 2080, at Thanksgiving, when he is at the age I am now, maybe he will show his own great-grandchild a fading photograph of himself sitting on an old dude's lap. "That's me and my great-grandfather," he might say. "I spent my first Thanksgiving with him as you did with me. He did the same with his great-grandfather. Isn't that a thought to be thankful for?"
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.
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